On October 12th, I published One Life to Lead, a book that took over two years to assemble and sets a foundation for leaders to build a business in harmony with building their lives. I was tired of believing that I can’t build a life until my business is successful so everything will be on hold until then. Well, here’s the little problem I ran into. My family wasn’t super interested in waiting around for that.

As many of you know, that tension drove action and in 2018, my family and I moved abroad to Costa Rica for a year to put our lives on a new trajectory. I wasn’t going as the result of some big payday. I was going because I wanted to architect a life on my terms, confident that I would, in this big and abundant world, figure out my next professional chapter. The work to get from idea to live abroad to actually living abroad was a game of significant logistics. And I wrote about that in a post titled, “How Asana Saved My Marriage”. And it’s true. My wife and I rallied around a shared plan and it was that shared plan that created a connection to pursue this adventure as partners.

Now, two years later, we are living in Seattle, and the essence of that journey to Costa Rica and the space that it provided in my life, is published in a book that I’m excited to share. But like any complicated plan, publishing a book has been a massive undertaking that I had not anticipated as I was beginnning to write wistfully in Costa Rica. So I figured if Asana could help save my marriage, it could certainly help me get my book published.

What I did was assemble through research all the actions recommended to begin the promotion process of bringing a book to life and sufficiently marketing it. That process has to start way before a manuscript is even finished. I started later than I should have. But I put all of the tasks into Asana, set up sections by month with associated tasks and then proceeded to work the plan. Most of the flurry of activity has come in the last few months and I created a “Priority” section in Asana to just keep me focused on what I really need to be doing ASAP as I get down to the wire.

What I love about Asana is that I don’t have to think after I have done the planning. I really just need to execute and follow the plan. Just follow the plan. There is a chapter in One Life to Lead titled, “Taking Action”. A meaningful part of taking action is building a plan and that is critical when there is an intended payoff that is multiple months down the road. Without a plan, it’s easy to focus on what feels like important and urgent. And so you feel like you’re making progress because you’re doing stuff. It’s just not the right stuff.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with One Life to Lead but I do know that its odds of impact were made much greater because I had an easy way to plan ahead. Onward. One Life to Lead is available now on Amazon